Football's holy temple of sleaze

WILLIAM WONG, EXAMINER COLUMNIST

Published 4:00 am, Friday, January 17, 1997

AMERICA IS, once again, on the verge of an annual ritual: homage to the football god known as Super Bowl Hype.

Bay Area football fanatics, mostly of the male persuasion, don't have much of an emotional stake in the Green Bay Packers-New England Patriots game Jan. 26 in New Orleans. The local teams, the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders, flopped on the way to the finals - and said goodbye to their head coaches.

That doesn't mean the local testosterone set (yours truly included), along with compliant females, won't celebrate the mid-winter culture fest: Super Bowl parties.

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The football game has become an excuse for millions of Americans, even non-football lovers, to get together. The occasion is more fun than attending formal houses of worship.

A lot more than a simple football victory is at stake. Big business invests ungodly sums to try to reach the 120 million or so Americans who watch the Super Bowl on television, to say nothing of millions more around the world.

Super Bowl Sunday has become the single most important day for the export of American culture to a globe amazingly eager to absorb the marketing fineries of consumer capitalism.

The well-orchestrated frenzy built around a violent game contains the seeds of cultural disarray. The world of professional sports offers a portrait of a society built on false values.

Michael Irvin illustrates this morally ambiguous phenomenon. Irvin is the superbly gifted wide receiver of the Dallas Cowboys, a team that has won three of the last four Super Bowls. The Cowboys are known as "America's Team," a once noble and now sneeringly derisive title.

Irvin's on-field performance has been overshadowed by his off-field exploits. Early last year, he was caught in a Dallas motel room with cocaine in the company of two so-called models. Irvin, a married man with children, pled no contest to felony drug possession charges and was sentenced to community service and four years of probation. No jail time. The judge cautioned Irvin to stay clean or face up to 20 years in prison.

Shortly before the Cowboys playoff game a few weeks ago, a shocking allegation was made that Irvin and a fellow Cowboy, Erik Williams, participated in a rape of a Dallas woman. Many people asked, How could Irvin be so stupid?

There was a general assumption of the players' guilt. Sports columnist Dave Anderson of the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, called for the Dallas team to immediately suspend Irvin. Presumed guilty until proved innocent.

It turns out the accuser, a former topless dancer named Nina Shahravan, made up the story. It was a hoax, according to Dallas police. Irvin wasn't even at the scene.

Why were so many of us willing to believe the woman and not Irvin and Williams? The players' past troubles (Williams settled a previous rape allegation brought by a 17-year-old topless dancer) surely played a part in our prejudicial attitudes.

The big-money world of sports celebrityhood, which reaches no higher level than Super Bowl Hype, has corrupted us to the point where we sense that superstar sleaze is an inherent part of America's new religion.

So long as football fanatics worship at the Super Bowl altar, we can't escape the amorality that apparently is one of the religion's fundamental tenets.